My MC is typing a simple google search into her iPhone. How do you format the typing and the results? Thanks.
It's usually indented, no quotes, it looks like plain text or italics are not a settled issue but I lean toward plain text. Formatting text messages Can't vouch for that blog author but it looks about right. You can probably choose to use all lower case if your character consistently texts in lower case.
Not sure if it is a legitimate grammatical use of the colon, but when conversing with others in chat or in games, I will use something like what follows, but I will note that I am going to omit quotes, and instead put it the example conversation and search terms in italics. If you want to see the full set of results, search for: fractal animals This seems simple enough, but you have to take into consideration that using quote marks on a search engine makes a difference on the results (or it used to, but that's another story for another time). If you want to see the full set of results, search for: "fractal animals" This format indicates that the search terms are inclusive of the quote marks, which tells the search engine to look for the exact term. The same applies for using - and +, or AND and NOT. Not sure how well that would fly in a book though.
I'd just describe the action "Hey" said Jane "i'll just google that for you" or Tom suddenly realised that searching for Great Tits on the family computer was a bad idea, Mom would never believe he was just interested in ornithology End of the day this comes under the 'don't show irrelevant detail' rule
Honestly, I hate having to format digital messages, so I usually use little tricks to avoid it whenever possible. With a general search, I would format it something like this: She typed out "why do vampires hate garlic?" in the search bar and waited. Out came pages of academic articles, forum sites, and creepy blogs blogs about "real life" vampires. Or something similar to that. Since what she's finding out is probably more important than what she's typing, you don't necessarily have to have it written out in a specially formatted way.